NetBSD 2.1 with a SS20;3 X 90 MHz Hypersparc´s; 540 Mb RAM, hme0..

..is my Pride & Joy.Agreed, slow by todays standards, but a piece of mechanical engineering that todays thing-o-plastics can only dream of!

Unfortunately for the computer, it has wound up in my hands. I come from the land of Mac OSX, where all the nasty under-the-hood-stuff is hidden away.

Now, my aim is to put a generic.MP kernel inside.To have X-windows running a point-and-click desktop with openofice, mail and maybe primitive multimedia.To have the computer understand that I want to display swedish & mandarin fonts on the screen and a swedish-only keyboard.

I have a 38 GB HD in a separate diskdrive outside the pizzabox (heard there was a problem with heatbuildup) and a ISP that delivers 10 Mb ethernet DHCP through the happymeal NIC.

What I have done (I think) is installed the bare-bones NetBSD 2.1 with the generic 1 processor kernel & all the support libraries available on the CD.I have a correct time & timezone.I have configured the rc.conf with "dhclient=YES" and "wscons=YES" (the latter in the hope of magically enabeling the swedish keyboardmapping).I have configured wscons.conf with keyboard autodetect; swedish keymapping (something which is completely ignored by my Sparc...or maybe my keyboard?).

I have tried using the pkg_add-method described in the manuals to download new shells and gnome, but all I get is a long message, telling me (I believe) to stop trying doing something as stupid as that.I have tried the ping-command on CNN´s homepage, which seems to work.

I´d be most gratefull if someone could advice me what the next step should be, bearing in mind I know blissfully little of Unix in general and NetBSD in particular.I have acquired a little knowledge of vi, so I know how to edit different xx.conf-files, but that´s about it.

Use 'pkg_add -v' to get a more verbose printout. If you Internet connection is ok, pkg_add should work out of the box.It is recommended not only to rely on binary packages, but to use pkgsrc as well. So I would recommend you to start with pkgsrc as a next step. Sometimes, the app you want to install does not exist as a binary, only as source.

Max_Headroom wrote:

I have tried using the pkg_add-method described in the manuals to download new shells and gnome, but all I get is a long message, telling me (I believe) to stop trying doing something as stupid as that.

Please help us help you by providing the entire error message and output of your install attempt.

I´d be happy to hand over all of the dmesg-info (which is what I believe you need me to post, or are there any more info needed?).

However, maybe I ought to start my asking this; is there any manuals available, on how to proceed after a (hopefully) successfull bare-bones install, written in a way for a newbie to understand?

I have ried using the sushi-program, which seems to create moer problem than it solves.

I have come to believe in the stability and security of NetBSD. And its one of the few unix-flavours which claims to be able to run SMP with Hypersparcs. But the learningcurve sure starts to look awfully steep...